Qiwei Yu

📸 Image of the month: August!

This month we are excited to feature “𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐥𝐢𝐩𝐢𝐝 𝐝𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐬” by Yu et al.

Learn more about their exciting research here: qiweiyuu.github.io

🔗 (paper): doi.org/10.1039/D5SM...
(1/4)

Congrats Mattia!!

Now out in Physical Review Letters: work led by Andrew Pyo showing that the accumulation of beneficial mutations can be greatly accelerated by a mutation rate that decreases with increasing relative fitness.

journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Mapping and engineering RNA-driven architecture of the multiphase nucleolus - Nature Spatially segregated rRNA processing dictates nucleolar morphology and drives outward progression of pre-ribosomal RNA through nucleolar phases.

Nature research paper: Mapping and engineering RNA-driven architecture of the multiphase nucleolus

https://go.nature.com/44Tib11

Mapping and engineering RNA-driven architecture of the multiphase nucleolus - Nature Spatially segregated rRNA processing dictates nucleolar morphology and drives outward progression of pre-ribosomal RNA through nucleolar phases.

Combining sequencing and imaging, @brangwynnelab.bsky.social maps the spatiotemporal dynamics of rRNA processing, demonstrating how rRNA serves as both a scaffold and a substrate for the nucleolus—a multiphase, liquid-like structure. 🧪 🧬

Apply now to be a CPBF Fellow in 2026! puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

Nonequilibrium polysome dynamics promote chromosome segregation and its coupling to cell growth in Escherichia coli Polysome formation within the nucleoid and repulsion between these major cytoplasmic components provide a self-organizing mechanism for chromosome segregation and modulation of its timing across growt...

Check out our paper in eLife to see details of the model and more amazing experiments by Alex!
elifesciences.org/articles/104...

The paper provides comprehensive evidence in support of this mechanism, but here is one of my favs: as a consequence, ectopic polysome accumulations, caused by redirecting gene expression away from the chromosome and toward plasmids, are sufficient to drive aberrant nucleoid dynamics

Not only does our model capture the dynamics of polysome and nucleoid during segregation (kymograph below), but it also explains a linear relation between segregation time and growth rate, with a single (!) fitting parameter (figure below).

With a minimal theoretical model, we show that the segregation dynamics can be explained by considering two ingredients: steric repulsion between polysome and nucleoid, and nonequilibrium production and degradation dynamics of polysomes.

Our recent work (elifesciences.org/articles/104...) combines theory and experiments (by Alex Papagiannakis and Christine Jacobs-Wagner) to understand how chromosome segregation is coupled to growth in E coli. We demonstrate that the nonequilibrium dynamics of polysomes may play a key role.

Living systems operate nonequilibrium processes across many scales in space and time. Is there a model-free way to bridge the descriptions at different levels of coarse-graining? Here we find that preserving the evidence of time-reversal symmetry breaking works remarkably well!

Biology consumes energy at the microscale to power functions across all scales: From proteins and cells to entire populations of animals.

Led by @qiweiyu.bsky.social‬ and @mleighton.bsky.social‬, we study how coarse-graining can help to bridge this gap 👇🧵

arxiv.org/abs/2506.01909

Postdoc opportunity!
Join us in heavenly Vancouver (Canada) to develop fundamental nonequilibrium stat mech, thermo, and info theory applied to biomolecular machines and in close collaboration with experiment.
Details: www.sfu.ca/physics/siva...

In this paper, we studied how patterns emerge from a combination of the phase separation of lipids and the elastic deformation of the membrane. In a ternary membrane system, we determined how pattern size and morphology depend on lipid composition, surface tension, etc, in agreement with experiments

Our work on lipid domain pattern formation is now published in Soft Matter as part of the themed collection "Pioneering Investigators": pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

Grateful for my advisor Andrej Košmrlj for his mentorship, and for our collaborators for teaching us a lot about membranes!

Excited to be at @apsphysics.bsky.social March meeting this week. Check out the following talks from my collaborators and me!